Thursday, 18 December 2008

There are many questions that need to be asked here. Let's start with the obvious. Is the minister who has been talking to Jaguar Land Rover by any chance the same Lord Mandelson who played the uncompromising free-marketeer in relation to another, ra...

A screeching global economic slowdown has coincided with a global banking crisis. Traumatised investors all around the world are pulling their money out of assets, shares and banks and ploughing it into government securities.
The result is that money...

The idea that young children should not be separated from lone parents on benefit and, that if they are separated, those children will suffer, is naive in the extreme. Quite often good-quality childcare away from their homes would go some way towards...

The investigation into the killing of Rachel Nickell, who was stabbed to death on Wimbledon Common in 1992, and which Napper finally admitted yesterday, was botched from the start. The Metropolitan Police placed huge confidence in the judgement of a ...

We put a compromise on the table allowing us to assure everyone that they won't have to go through a new Lisbon treaty ratification procedure because there won't be any change to the Lisbon treaty.
Second, I think that in the future the commission pr...

US President-elect Barack Obama has also pledged to withdraw troops from Iraq and I warmly welcome moves in this direction. My fear, however, is that a key motivator behind this approach is the desire to bolster troop numbers in Afghanistan. While th...

By some estimates the deal as a whole may only lead to a 4 per cent domestic cut in emissions over the coming 12 years. But the vehicle "renewable energy" target, expected to be fulfilled largely by biofuels, may cost considerably more in indirect la...

The greatest difficulty he has faced, and one he acknowledges with some frustration, is in projecting the policies, even the presence, of the third party at a time when there are two strong main parties in the Commons and a global economic crisis dom...

The decisive moment in Britain's intervention came on 24 June that year, when six soldiers were killed in the grim, dangerous Iraqi marsh town of Majar al-Kabir, a centre of resistance to Saddam. Local people were asking what British troops were doin...

The Engineering Employers Federation (EEF) said yesterday that a quarter of industrial companies deferred wage settlements or froze pay in the three months to November. However, the more radical option of cutting wages, accompanied by a reduction in ...

Next time this happens, before you open your mouth to nag, why not give him a back rub instead? It's a jungle out there for the modern man, you see. Tarzan has realised that beating his chest is no longer an appropriate mating ritual, and that he is ...

We are well aware of the efforts demanded by such objectives when they face such major obstacles as the effects of a selfish and unfair international economic order favouring the developed countries and the interests of the large multinational corpor...

We were kidding ourselves if we ever allowed ourselves to believe that Islamist fundamentalist activism was confined to the marginalised, unemployed members of our Muslim community. One look at the backgrounds of the al-Qa'ida leadership and the mast...

Yet there is something that troubles about the project. 3D is all very well for sport. Who would not want to admire their favourite athletes from as many angles as possible? But do we really want everything broadcast to be looming out towards us?
Con...

If you follow the climate change agenda and you accept the science, you will need no convincing that cold winters in Britain will fairly soon be a thing of the past. Indeed, for the past 20 years, winters have been getting steadily warmer, with notic...

All of this is admirable. Privacy in such matters has much to recommend it, especially where children are concerned. Even more admirable, though, would have been an agreement to leave money out of the equation. Roll on the days when pre-nuptial agree...

This hasn't done Keanu much harm, either. Yesterday, I picked up Variety to find him beaming from the front page, next to the words "Alien Invasion!" His new flick, The Day the Earth Stood Still, had topped the week's box-office charts.
The film's ...